Quote:
Originally Posted by Philadelphia
That idea is right on track. The trouble is that taking it back and "fixing" the problems of concentrated urban poverty, which is part of the root of the corrupt democrat only local government and most certainly at the root of much of the crime problems, takes a lot of money and even beyond that never really gets fixed, just addressed. It's a lot easier for most taxpaying citizens outside and even inside philly to just leave things as they are.
While we are not technically obligated in any way to be our brothers' keepers, I see it as a little nonsensical to ask that the poor solve their own problems or that we shrug off those problems as the responsibility of solely the taxpayers who live within some artificially drawn geographic boundry.
The "gun" issue in philly is the same as in every urban center -- it's a crime problem. It's the same as when organized crime was causing too much high profile trouble leading the sheeple to call for what culminated in the NFA and what we have now as BATFE. This debate is extremely similar -- philly is perceived as some festering crime hole, lots of people are calling for action to address it, but they don't want to pay anything to deal with it. So the politicians from Rendel on down to Nutter demonize guns and start showboating law after law making it look to the uninformed that they are trying to do something useful.
What might actually work would be in the short term building more prisons so the present population of violent antisocials can age out while in prison, and in the long term implementing evidence based approaches to mitigating the social problems that lead to crime and recidivism. My forecast is this will never happen in PA. It simply costs too much money. Much easier for the pols in the rest of PA to showboat on how they fight against spending any money on that boil on PA's ass in PA's southeast, and the pols locally here to scream about how their hands are tied because the state won't allow them to implement more and more control.
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The first step for the adults to intervene and "fix" the problems of more than a million adults and their dependents, would be to stop enabling them.
We subsidize bastardy by paying women money as long as they give birth without being able to identify a father with a job. Since we don't want unwed parenting, we should punish it, and that's easy enough to do because single parenting creates its own hardships, as long as we don't artificially pretend that one parent with limited skills can support a family. My parents raised kids without subsidized day care, without free government cheese, without a stipend stolen from the neighbors; but there were 2 of them.
We allow special privileges to break the rules to "special" people, by either refusing to prosecute anyone, or having an unspoken rule that certain people can park illegally, or sometimes by explicitly allowing VIP's special spots in the municipal parking structure. Instead of punishing individuals and businesses who break the rules, voters elect them to government. The Street brothers are an embarrassing example of that, with one of them named to a commission while owing it thousands of dollars in arrearages.
Punishing local criminals instead of blaming Harrisburg for street crime would be another good step. But since a majority of voters are related to at least one criminal, or have friends with convictions, that's probably a bad election strategy.
September 18th, 2009
Re: Why the rest of PA hates Philadelphia
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